Anxiety as an algorithm
adamjuliangoldstein.com
adamjuliangoldstein.com
I think this helps with catastrophic thinking (i.e. "I'll never pass another technical interview if I quit my job -> My girlfriend will leave me -> I'll run out of money -> I'll be on the street" etc.), verbalizing this kind of thing can help show that often the extreme worst case thinking seems a little more ridiculous out loud.
It also helps to imagine a friend thinking these things and what you would say or point out to them.
I suspect that a lot of anxiety comes from too actively predicting future negative outcomes along with too much uncertainty, as you get more comfortable with things anxiety tends to go down. The problem with growing a company is if you're successful you'll never get comfortable because things are always changing and scaling up (like mentioned in the article).
I've also found it personally helpful to reframe failure as 'learning experience' and now you know more of what works and what doesn't (rather than a direct evaluation of some fixed ability), this helps embrace failure and growth without constantly doubting yourself or thinking that you may just not have the capacity to do what you want.
Sometimes it can be hard to zero in on the anxiety cause though - it took me a while to realize that one of the reasons I didn't want to go to the city (SF) is that I was afraid I wouldn't find parking, along with just generally more uncertainty in a crowded/busy place. Sounds ridiculous, but high base anxiety can make pushing yourself out of local maxima to do things you want a constant vigilant effort. The easy thing to do is rationalize why the status quo is better or why the status quo is actually what you want. I think a lot of people do this without realizing anxiety is a partial driver of those decisions.
In fact, you can go further, and aim to fail. (Not in the sense of sabotaging yourself, but in the sense of doing things you're pretty sure are above your skill level, in the knowledge that you're unlikely to succeed at them, but are likely to learn from them.) Go in with the goal of learning as much as possible from the experience; and if you actually succeed, well, that's a pure bonus.
This is what Rejection Therapy is about, but it's also the basis of scientific positivism: you aim to prove the null hypothesis ("there is nothing interesting going on here.") Then you either succeed at proving that—and learning more about what hypotheses are worth making—or you fail to prove the null hypothesis, and instead discover some entirely-novel piece of knowledge about the world.
Well put. I've found this applies to most things in life: relationships, moving cities, switching jobs. I feel over the past year or so I've gotten better at identifying that thought spiral and stopping it before it consumes me (usually). Therapy and journaling have been most helpful here.
Kirk Douglas recently died. One of the things he said it that he did not fear poverty, loosing all his wealth, because he was raised in poverty as a child.
He probably was happy in lots of ways, even being poor.
One of the things I love to do is going out and living in a cavin in the woods with all the inconvenience it brings you. No computer, no phone,alone, wild animals, very simple food and you could die from simple things, like running off a hillside.
This makes you feel alive like nothing else, makes you feel gratitude for what you have(your family, your work, your computers, your car) and also gives you psychological safety, that whatever happens you can deal with it.
It was a known technique by Seneca, 2000 years ago.
Is this not the definition of anxiety?
None of those examples you've mentioned sound in any way ridiculous to me. I've had two of those happen and one very close to.
An approach that seems to be working for me lately is to simply try and accept the (realistic )worst case outcomes as a very real possibility, try to accept it as-is, but without piling on further mental agony with value judgements.
"Yes, XYZ can and probably will happen, but I will survive it. If I don't, I wouldn't need to worry about it anymore anyway."
The 'mental immune system', which uses imagination to search for potential paths to classify likely future outcomes suffers from one very critical issue.
Selection bias / neural network (literal) training set problems. Repeated failures without success lead to the weight of that success against the failures skewing the prediction algorithm. Reality might or might not match the perceived lack of paths worth perusing, but the weight of that imagined failure against the slim odds of success surely also influences the ability to take the paths that could work even if they are discovered.
Repairing a biological entity's neural network for predicting future outcomes must surely also correlate with providing a 'good' feed of data to re-normalize expectations. My own theory and belief is that our evolutionary ancestors communities were small and 'depression' or other signs of distress resulted in this reconditioning; a social control rather than a directly biological one. Modern society seems to have broken that control loop and thus the situation becomes irreparable.
No, I chose the word __community__ for good reason.
The classic experiment is the cookie experiment, where the outcome is by resisting a plate of cookies they can have as many as they like but if they take one straight away they only get one. But it generalizes to many other outcomes too (not sure if outcome is the right word but you get what I mean?)
Inaccurate mentalised threats are constructed in the brain for very good reason. Typically they are real when they form, and are required in order to stabilise the caregiving environment when young. (If mum/dad gets very angry when I make a fuss trying to get what I want, I quickly develop a fear of standing up for myself. This fear is useful to placate mum/dad, but not useful when I'm an adult and getting walked over.)
Strangely, the brain seems to have its own method to explain to the owner what these inaccurate mentalised threats are - dreams. And I can assure the author that the cure to nightmares is not as simple as recognising they are not real - there is a cure to them though. Dreams were extremely important to my own development/de-anxious-ing, so I wrote a paper on this function during my Msc in Psychology. It is free to download here: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz, and was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
One refinement is that there are a number of earlier challenges you faced that are now "solved problems" so some of the squares should be marked blue instead of black or white because it's a risk you have encountered and mastered. For example, how to file taxes as a corporation. How to hire someone.
A second refinement: there are also decision rules you can follow that limit your exposure to entire categories of risk. For example: don't finance your startup using credit card debt.
Constructive Pessimism https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2016/09/07/constructive-pessim...
How to Tell When Your Team Has a Workable Plan of Action https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2012/06/02/how-to-tell-when-yo...
Risk Mitigation: If You Predict Rain Build an Ark https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2015/12/01/risk-mitigation-if-...
On the flip side there is treatment to allergies, controlled small doses to triggers. I think anxiety may work similarly. For example, public speaking more often with smaller audiences will reduce initial anxiety in the long run.
However, in the past few years I've experienced more of a general malaise from a sensitivity to being in a state of flow; when not being in one, i feel a sort of shame for squandering my time.
In short, I respect anxiety as an effective way of getting things done. Everything in moderation.
Not that I don't believe we aren't complex systems, we are, to be sure, and it's not that life doesn't hurt sometimes, as it surely does.
But the whole idea really just grates on me. I like being a monkey, with all my strengths and weaknesses, I wouldn't trade that to be a cyborg for all the money in the world. Each to their own I guess! I guess I just don't think the analogies, simulations, etc. really do us much justice as a species.
Wolfram's A New Kind of Science really changed my thinking about how we look at computational spaces.
When it's pointed out that our minds are computer-like, it's because they include aspects which resemble computers: e.g. when some subset of its behavior is describable by an algorithm that could in principle be executed by a computer (even if that algorithm is just an approximation).
Same with the idea that we're monkeys: it's true that we have shared characteristics with other animals, that while we're unique in some ways we are not totally apart from the rest of life on earth.
> I like being a monkey
Unfortunately the only option is to be a human: part monkey, part computer :P
Other way around, these computers we use resemble us (however not particularly closely) because we created them, not vice-versa.
The fact that we took inspiration from ourselves in developing computers only strengthens my original point.
Similarly, the concept of cybernetics predates the naming of the field by a few centuries, considering tools like eyeglasses, and possibly millennia, if we include dentures, canes, or wheelchairs.
While we're on analogies that irritate you but have reasonable historical and scientific contexts, I'd like to remind you of the idea of humans as colonies of trillions of cells. A human isn't one thing, but trillions of things, much smaller and more autonomous than one might think.
There are anxiety disorders which can have a crippling effect on someone's ability to function and turn their life into a living hell. There are many entrepreneurs who suffer from them. Entrepreneurs tend to be out there on the fringes of what is neurotypical, with all the attendant pros and cons.
I suspect if your reaction is "personally I'd rather be myself than think this way," you're simply not the target audience of the article.
There is no doubt we are incredibly complex, so much so that we've not been able to crack the puzzle that is "us". We invent crude medicines to carpet-bomb some bacteria/virus, which can potentially harm another part of the body, we staple cadaver-parts onto our knees to move well again, we're incredible crude in a bio-hackish way.
We've not even begun to understand what goes on in our heads.
Room for improvement? I'm not sure we are there yet. Room for understanding what is going on? A lot of room there. Its a massive empty hangar to put all our future knowledge into.
Bottom line is ... I don't think we should go about pulling strings without caution because it will not happen without consequence.
- I believe the sophistication and complexity of what makes us feel living forms is still way outside the current science radar and that all that think they're onto an improvement are myopic
- the dig down process of improving the somatic layer (bodies, cells) seems backward to me, our "souls" live on another plane, and doesn't really need much improvements down below. I'd rather see a cultural effort toward.. well culture. Simpler, leaner bonds and sharing.
I imagine many of us from a young age find an interest in math and science because the logic makes sense. We build on first principles and everything has an objective truth. Perhaps in our early lives we experience things that don't "make sense" in this way, so we throw ourselves into a world of logic that we can more easily understand. Great for academic success, and after all, when we're young we're probably in a world where academic success is lauded (school or college). We are quite literally rewarded with good grades and honor societies for thinking in this way, so it reinforces the idea that this way of thinking is "right". Or at least, this was the case for me throughout high school and college. I remember thinking at the time, "All of these people around me partying, having fun, getting into trouble, living illogically -- they're doing things wrong."
But then at a certain point we leave these structured environments and are on our own. And we continue to run into experiences where we try, again and again, to apply algorithms to life, and they almost always fail. It seems like we can come to one of two conclusions: Either the algorithm is still incomplete and the parameters need tweaking, or we realize that there is no algorithm, or at least no knowable algorithm. We're just too complex, too irrational by nature, to be described by some knowable set of rules.
Every time our "life algorithm" fails it hurts, because it feels like we failed. So we do whatever we possibly can to avoid failure in the future, and yet those failures keep coming and hurt more and more each time.
Until, hopefully, we arrive at that second conclusion which comes with both relief and regret. Relief because instead of trying to describe life with an algorithm, we can actually start living it. And regret because we no longer have the freedom to make those same sorts of mistakes that help us build character when we're young, because they probably have real consequences now. Plus it's really damn hard to give up the way we've been living since childhood. Things like practicing mindfulness and meditation help a lot.
Anyway...that's my two cents.